A manager at one of your clients’ favorite funds is retiring or leaving for another fund, and the client insists it’s time to cash out.
Is that the right time to jump ship? Not necessarily.
According to a new Morningstar study, immediately dumping the fund after a manager change is the wrong thing to do.
“We find, on average, there is no change in future performance following a fund-management change,” says Morningstar. “Yet, investors overreach and subsequently pull money from these funds.”
Morningstar’s study, “The Aftermath of Fund Management Change,” aimed to find out if manager change is correlated to future performance, and how investors react to changes, among other things. It monitored the performance of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity and fixed-income funds between January 2003 and December 2016.
The study measures the performance of funds after one or several manager changes over one, three, six, 12 and 36 months. In general it found that investors “tend to overreact” to management changes, especially in funds with the most assets.
Why should investors stop overreacting to managers moving elsewhere? Because the fund industry has tended to do an effective job of succession planning, the study said. Therefore, Morningstar argued. “the fund manager's industry experience has no effect on either returns or growth rates."
The average economic significance of the change was very small. “We found no relationship between any type of management change and future returns,” the study said. “There is zero relationship between a management change on gross excess returns measured in basis points.”
In explaining its findings, Morningstar posited that funds have changed over the last few years and that performance is less dependent on the performance of a superstar manager.
“Funds are run by a team of people, down to their research analyst performing due diligence on a stock or a bond,” the study said.